Sunday, January 03, 2016

Some Cheap Shots at Islam

Permit me some levity and incidental observations
about Islam. It’s a stress reliever. And I need to laugh occasionally;
otherwise I’d curl up in a fetal position and suck my thumb. Not really. But I
do need to vent my inner humor

For starters, it would be interesting to delve
briefly into the psychological and character makeup of the man the Muslim
Brotherhood (MB) and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) have
practically elevated to sainthood, Sayyid Qutb. He is the prissy Muslim squirt
whose various scribblings are held in such high esteem by the Ummah. Qutb (1906-1966) wrote Milestones, which is considered such a basic,
fundamental document in the Islamic literature, that it may as well be treated
by infidels (looking in from the outside) as an extension of the Koran. Omar Sacirbey in a February 2011
Washington Post article called him the Muslim Brotherhood’s “intellectual
godfather.”

Beginning in 1948, Qutb spent about two and a half
years in America (with some little time in Washington, D.C. and Palo, Alto,
California), attending a college in Greeley, Colorado. He was sent there, as
the story goes, by his friends in the Egyptian ministry of education to get him
out of harm’s way from the Nasser government, which was beginning to be annoyed
by the Muslim Brotherhood’s call for a return to Islamic purity. Qutb was
showing signs of sympathizing with those calls. As Robert Irwin, in a Guardian
article of late October 2001, put it:

Everything
changed in 1948 when he was sent to study education in the US. It was a fateful
decision. Perhaps those who sent him thought that it would broaden his
horizons.

Instead, the sojourn in Colorado shriveled his
horizons. He was alienated by American culture and society. He wanted to be a
“good” Muslim, not a part-time Muslim. That meant renouncing virtually all
earthly temptations and pleasures.

Almost
immediately his newfound resolve was tested on the [ocean] liner, as a drunken
American woman attempted to seduce him. Qutb did not succumb, nor was he later
won over by the charms of the American way of life. He was repelled by
prejudice against Arabs and shocked by the freedom that American men allowed
their women. He described the churches as "entertainment centers and
sexual playgrounds". After two and a half years of exposure to western
civilization he knew that he hated it and, on his return to Egypt in 1951, he
joined the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

Who knew that American culture and society could so
aggrieve a person that he would devote a goodly portion of his hate-filled writing
and preaching to excoriating America? Greeley was a “dry” town, with nary a bar
insight (it became “wet” in 1969). It was a church-going town, too, and this is
what the easily offended Qutb probably saw as America’s greatest failing and
sin: they were virtually the only venues where men and women could meet and
socialize. It was also too “materialistic” and obsessed with sports. A Smithsonian
article from February 2006 noted:

Regarding the excesses of American
culture—vulgarity, materialism and promiscuity—Qutb expressed shock, but it
rang a bit hollow. “The American girl
is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity,” he wrote. “She knows it
lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows
seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely
thighs, sleek legs — and she shows all this and does not hide it."”
These curvy jezebels pursued boys with “wide, strapping chest[s]” and “ox
muscles,” Qutb added with disgust. Yet
no matter how lascivious his adjectives, the fastidious, unmarried Egyptian
could not convincingly portray the church dances and Look magazines he
encountered in sleepy Greeley as constituting a genuine sexual “jungle.”

Qutb ought to have spent some time in the American
South among the Baptists, which was and probably remains a greater sexual
“jungle” than staid, religiously conservative Greeley, Colorado. But I suspect
that Qutb’s objection to those American girls who knew how to flaunt their
assets, and those robust American boys who conquered them, was based on envy
because of an Islam inculcated incapacity in himself to enjoy life. Islam
frowns on earthly paradises because those pleasures and temptations will be
available in Islamic paradise. Allah’s Paradise doubtless is imagined by the
faithful as one eternal disco party, with Allah as the Wolfman Jack-like DJ,
with flashing disco balls overhead, with with scantily clad houris lap- and
pole-dancing, with an open bar and buffet, and “private rooms” galore for all
the randy Rashids and “martyrs.”

"They
danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with
tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips,
and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire..."

In another life, Sayyid Qutb could have been the
author of a dozen sexually charged bodice-rippers,
writing under the name of Pearly Gates.

Egyptian
political scientist Mamoun Fandy tells [Robert] Siegel that Qutb's critique of
America was in many ways a critique of Egyptian society. "Fandy says Qutb
was warning Egyptians of the West, of modernity, of things they were very
attracted to," Siegel says. As for Qutb's revulsion over American
sexuality, Fandy says there is no evidence that Qutb ever had a sexual
relationship in his life.

From my readings of Qutb, and especially what
little of his 1950 The America That I
Have Seen I have been able to read (called a “book” in some quarters, it
was only a magazine-length
article), he was a repressor with no capacity for enjoyment in life other than
perhaps food. He may have also been a latent homosexual. (He was especially exercised
by Greeley’s “bloody, monstrous” wrestling matches.)

To Qutb, America was jahili, or backward, as much of a “moral desert” as the Arabian
Peninsula was before Mohammad converted it by sword and extortion. Concerning
the “proper” role of sex in his “perfect” world, Qutb wrote in Milestones:

The
family system and the relationship between the sexes determine the whole
character of a society and whether it is back or civilized, jahili or Islamic. Those societies which
give ascendance to physical desires and animalistic morals cannot be considered
civilized, no matter how much progress they may make in industry or science.
This is the only measure which does not err in gauging true human progress….

Thus,
only Islamic values and morals, Islamic teachings and safeguards, are worthy of
mankind, and from this unchanging and true measure of human progress, Islam is
the real civilization and Islamic society is truly civilized. (pp. 98-99; Milestones, Dar Al-Ilm, Damascus, Syria,
no publication date).

I’ve always tried to imagine what a global
caliphate would look like. It is world domination that the Islamic Movement
seeks to accomplish. Here’s one translation of the applicable Koranic verse, Chapter (2) sūrat l-baqarah (The Cow,
2-193):

And fight them until there is no more Fitnah
(disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah) and (all and every kind
of) worship is for Allah (Alone). But if they cease, let there be no
transgression except against Az-Zalimun (the polytheists, and wrong-doers,
etc.)

So, there would be a global caliphate, divvied up
between a bingo cage of sub- or regional caliphates. But it wouldn’t matter
where you lived. It would be an “ideal” Islamic society, such as Qutb
envisioned. Practically, it would be a society in stasis, a society arrested in
progress, immobile, and stagnant. Everyone would be a Muslim, except for what
remained of the unconquered, unbelieving infidels, who would presumably be kept
in an open-air corral and trotted out to work in salt mines or granite quarries.
An electronic signal from the magic clock
tower in Mecca would inform everyone that it was time to pray, and every
Muslim in the world would stop what he was doing and, facing East and Mecca,
perform the Shahada
and other Islamic ablutions, sink to his (or her) knees, raise his derriere (an
action which I call mooning the West and Western civilization), and mutter his complete,
degrading, and utter servitude
and submission to Allah.

“There
is no god but Allah; Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.” Longer versions are
common, especially those beginning with “I bear witness” or “I testify,” e.g.: “I bear witness that there is no god but
Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”

The ideal Islamic society is a society calculated
to dull the sharpest minds, or to keep them submerged until they drown. The
whole world would be at “peace” (a Sharia-enforced “peace”), nothing important
or noteworthy would happen, passions would be abridged or squashed, there would
be no one left to “fight,” it would be insufferably dull and uneventful, except
for the chance to taunt the surviving infidels.

Allah, by the way, is an indescribable being with
the contradictory powers of omniscience and omnipotence. Most artistic
representations of him have been made by Western artists. Islam forbids any
representations of Allah to prevent “idolatry,” as well of Mohammad. The Greeks
and the Romans at least imagined their gods (and goddesses) as beings of human
form. Eastern religions mostly fashioned their gods after animals or human-like
animals (or, if you will, animal-like humans). But Allah is just a “force,” and
so, in the abstract, is the Judeo-Christian Supreme Being. Perhaps this is the
ubiquitous “Force” in the Star Wars
films. ”May the Force be with you.” The most iconic Christian depiction of God
is Michelangelo’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. The
Jewish Torah
and Talmud
also state that man was created in God’s image, although there are no Jewish
artistic representations of God.

Without any known human attributes, Allah must be
imagined to be some kind of glowing, pulsating force of a whimsical mien. One
could call him the Supreme Finger-Snapper, except we don’t know if he (or it)
has any hands. Or arms or legs. Or a head. Or a torso.

Former Christian clerics, if they participated in Interfaith
Dialogue with Muslim clerics, and learned to their ultimate dismay that
Islam promotes Unifaith, or Islam, as the only true faith, would have also learned by now that the Jesus
they once touted as the bringer of peace, tolerance, brotherly love, and turning the other cheek
was not the same Jesus, or Isa. Christ was one of
the Biblical characters that the early Koranic fabricators appropriated from
early Christianity. The Islamic Jesus was a bonafide Muslim preacher. This
Islamic Conan the Barbarian
will slay
swine and fight the one-eyed Deceiver, Dajjāl,
who will pose as a Messiah or a
prophet. Isa will defeat him in a terrific battle.

The
three actions of breaking “the cross”, killing pigs and abolishing the jizyah
tax are based on the notion that Jesus will eliminate all other religions on
the earth other than Islam. Shafi and Usmani explain that to “break the
cross” means to “abolish worship of the cross”. Several Muslim friends
that I’ve spoken with have expressed their understanding of this tradition:
Jesus will break or remove all crosses from the rooftops and steeples of
churches throughout the earth.

This
action will thus indicate that Jesus will be making a clear statement regarding
his disapproval of the false notion that he was ever crucified on a
cross. The killing of the swine is so that the “Christian belief of its
lawfulness is belied.” 14 The reason for abolishing the jizyah tax
(the compulsory poll-tax that non-Muslims must pay in order to live in a Muslim
land) is based on the idea that when Jesus returns, the jizyah tax will no
longer be accepted. The only choice that Christians will have is to
accept Islam or die. As Sideeque M.A. Veliankode states in Doomsday Portents
and Prophecies:

Jesus,
the son of Mary will soon descend among the Muslims as a just judge… Jesus
will, therefore, judge according to the law of Islam… all people will be
required to embrace Islam and there will be no other alternative.

The Islamic story of the Virgin Birth is also a tweak
from the Christian tale. Allah just said, “Be!” and unmarried “Maryam” was with
child. Joseph the cuckolded carpenter makes no appearance in the story, either.
Muslims angrily deny that Christ was the son of Allah. Muslims say that Allah
would never stoop to such a ridiculous ruse. Isa was just another mortal, but a
special one who could speak almost as soon as he emerged from the womb, and worked
miracles even before he was out of diapers, or what passed for diapers in
pre-Mohammad times. He was never crucified. He just vanished in his early
twenties, and was reputed to return at the End of Days to swing his sword and cause mayhem
among the unbelievers, and then act as co-judge with Mohammad about who should
enter Paradise and who should burn in Hell forever. However, the tale of Maryam
brings new meaning to the role of single motherhood.

That battle scene scenario would be great material
for a new video game, or a big-screen Islamic epic, something on the order of a
Star Wars movie. The Islamic Jesus could wield a light saber
instead of a genuine sword. Al-Buraq,
Mohammad’s winged horse with the head of a woman could play a role, too, picking
up thousands of unbelievers and dropping them from 10,000 feet. There would be
a CGI cast of millions of armed Muslims with zap guns against millions of Satan’s
soldiers flailing away at everyone with their katanas and tossing bacon
falafels at the enemy, causing great consternation among the devout and almost
causing Jesus to lose the battle. What a spectacle that would be!

There. That’s out of my system. And now back to our
regularly scheduled programming.

I might add that I’m merciless in my treatment of Islam
in my novel, The
Black Stone, a Cyrus Skeen detective novel, set in San Francisco in
1930.